To begin with, I have never seen, nor read, either "The Da Vinci Code" or "Angels and Demons". My first experience with this series had been seeing "Angels and Demons" in theatres. After seeing it, I was so glad Jim dragged (OK, I agreed) to it. BUT I will say that I was leery. I had vowed never to see/read "The Da Vinci Code" because it supposedly bashes Catholics...and I just hate that. But after seeing "Angels and Demons" I don't know how that would be true. I need to see it too now....I mean, ok, if you were really sensitive and took everything seriously, then I could see how you would think that it bashes Catholics...but it's just a movie, just a plot line, and a good one at that! So now I shall outline a few points/parts/ideas from the movie, and remember, I've only seen it once.
Caution!! Spoilers to follow:
The guy with the glasses, you know, the one killing the Cardinals: It took me forever to figure him out. He was everywhere at the beginning. And usually the one way I could pick him out was from his glasses. But my main problem was what happened to him. So he's injured while burning the third Cardinal and then when Vittoria and Robert meet him in his hideout at the Castel Sant'Angelo he's still hurt and even though he has the chance to kill them both...doesn't. And his line of dialogue at this point is something along the lines of "I didn't kill you because it wasn't designated as part of my job. So you're free, but if you follow me after this, it's another matter". So weird.
So he leaves, so do Vittoria and Robert, and then they watch glasses guy get blown up in a car that he tries to hijack. At this point I'm like seriously?? wtf??
So somebody had hired glasses guy to scheme against the Cardinals and use all this Illuminati stuff, and then decided he knew too much or something? Or was he really part of the Guild? And how did he conveniently choose the one car in the street that was loaded with a bomb? Too convenient for me. Maybe I missed his resolution, but I somehow wanted someone to admit what really happened to him before the movie was over. He was a good actor for the character...but I was still confused as to how he fit in with the bigger scene of the movie. What did he have to do with Camerlengo? Was Camerlengo and glasses guy all a part of the Illuminati?
And......did this guy steal the Antimatter from the underground place at the very beginning? That was another thing I never figured out. At first, I thought the Antimatter got out by itself (I was picturing this escaped blob of some sort...dumb I know...) So my conclusion: Glasses guy was part of the Illuminati that was shown at the beginning of the movie. And conveniently decided to do this to the preferiti while all the other stuff was going on with Camerlengo. ????
Antimatter: This isn't a new concept. And I really liked how they discussed this issue as the marriage of science and religion. That was SO interesting to me. Science has always been driven toward the goal of finding creation. And religion claims to already have the answer. Antimatter is that same substance that Phillip Pullman writes about in his series, His Dark Materials. It's the Dust. I won't go into too much here, but I think if I ever wrote a thesis it would be on Antimatter/Dust in literature. So interesting. Antimatter to Vittoria is new, original matter created solely by humans and existing energy--it symbolizes the actuality creation. No wonder the church is scared. Pullman's Dust is dark matter that is somehow conscious and is attracted to people. The church in these books believe it is Original Sin. Yeah, now make sense of that...
Well, both of these strange matters seem to have some sort of origin that isn't in sync with how the rest of the world was created. Which doesn't jive with the church...at all. The would like to control everything (and I'm Catholic...but this seems to be how other people view it sometimes...) So any new information/experiments on Antimatter are being done in secret by the Illuminati (thought to have disappeared hundreds of years ago) and accidentally their experiment was brought above ground.
Richter: Finally, at the end, my heart went out to him the most. He was the one who honestly had the Pope and the Church's best interests at heart the whole time. Then, I was mad that I had thought he was a jerk the whole movie. A big jerk. But that's what made it good too...I didn't know I was supposed to like him until the end. But wow, too bad he had to die. Great plot twist here! Kudos.
Censuring: I understand why parts of the film were censured in some places. I had my hands over my eyes...a lot! Of course, I always peaked, but wow. It doesn't take much to make me hide my eyes, but some scenes in this movie reminded me of torture scenes from the book series The Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind. Nasty stuff. I really didn't need to see the poor Cardinal in the basement being eaten by rats. Or Silvano's eye gouged out. And I'm glad I didn't see this movie until I came back from Italy, I might have felt slightly strange in some of the churches if I had seen a priest being burned or a having his lungs punctured there. So yeah...
My conclusion: I need to read the book. Only then will I truly understand this mess. But I will admit, this movie was fantastic/horrible/graphic/insightful/emotional/etc. I felt so many different emotions throughout the movie...it was almost exhausting. But I think that's what a good movie does. And by graphic...I mean graphic. There was little girl behind Jim and I that was crying in the first 15 minutes and had to be taken out. Plus, it was 10x cooler since I was just in Italy in March. I had actually walked in many of the places that were the set (like the Pantheon and Vatican!) for this movie! Score!!!
Fantastic movie though. Go see it. NOW!
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